Almost all of what was up for election in England this year were shire authorities. Predominantly rural and conservative leaning, they are not fertile ground for Labour. The last time these councils were up for election (2013) saw UKIP upend a large proportion of them out of Conservative hands into no overall control. This time the trend has reversed, with UKIP reduced to a solitary outpost in Lancashire.

As was expected given the opinion polls at the time, Labour suffered significant seat losses and ended up at the end of the night with just Doncaster and Durham in their hands. Their status as the largest party on Lancashire and Cumbria councils was also lost with the Tories taking control of both (albeit in the case of Cumbria as a minority council).

The Liberal Democrats should have anticipated net gains, what with their performance in council by-elections only a few months previous, but, most likely as a consequence of the snap general election hype, they in fact went back, making seat losses despite a gain in votes. The Greens, though also gaining in vote share, stayed stagnant.

Some notes on the data.

Top vote method:

A good number of electoral wards/divisions in the UK (the areas an elected councillor represents) may be multi-member, in that more than one candidate will be elected. To calculate the percentage shares for each party in a fair and easy way, we use the Top Vote Method, which is that we only account for the highest vote a party attains in a multi-member ward, instead of adding all of them together.

Share changes on 2013:

A majority of the divisions up for election this year can be compared with their respective results in 2013. A significant minority however cannot be, either due to boundary changes or the division previously electing its representative unopposed.

Scotland uses the Single Transferable Vote voting system to elect its local representatives, meaning that the only way to calculate the percentage share for parties is to add up all of their respective first preferences. We decided not to go ahead in collecting vote transfers.

Share changes on 2012:

Unlike with England, we did not provide share ward-by-ward share changes on 2012. This is because the overwhelming majority of the wards up for election had undergone boundary changes.